quote:
To summarize your post, the "media darling" is the team or teams that are really good. In other words, they talk about the good teams, they don't just "pump" teams they like.

No, that's not what I said. I said there are "media darlings" that they will pump as much as possible given even the slightest excuse, while other teams accomplishing far more get significantly less pub. LSU is becoming one of those teams. Bama and SC already are such teams. If you think LSU got a lot of good press last year, just imagine what SC or Bama (or god forbid, Notre Dame) would have gotten if they had gone 13-0 in dominating fashion against probably the toughest schedule in modern football history. Hell, the '05 SC team didn't do nearly what LSU did last year and got far more positive press and hype.

The "media darling" status is just a modifier. Yes, the media will in general talk more about teams doing well than teams that aren't good enough to be nationally relevant. But among those who are doing well, some teams will get more attention than others. And those teams are almost always identifiable as the ones thought to draw more national audience interest. If ESPN thought that they could get better ratings talking about Idaho and Utah State than they could talking about Notre Dame and SC, we'd be seeing Gameday in Moscow instead of L.A. come October 6th.

What so many fans (of all teams) seem to have trouble grasping is that while the media is clearly, hugely and unapologetically biased towards some teams over others, the bias has little if anything to do with personal biases. It's all about the money which means it's all about the ratings. They pump the teams they think the audience wants to see pumped. They do that because if the national TV audience wants to tune in to hear about how awesome Bama and SC are, and all that channel is talking about is how Wisconsin or Mississippi State looked really good in their win over Purdue or Auburn, what is that audience going to do? Change the channel to a station that is talking about how awesome Bama and SC are. They would rather have the 150,000 people who are looking for stories on Wisconsin and Mississippi State changing the channel than the 20,000,000 people who are looking for stories on Alabama and Southern Cal. It's just that simple, and it has nothing to do with ESPN (or anyone else) "hating" LSU or any other school. It has to do with what they think the market wants.

Right now, that's working in our favor more than it's working against us.